Why Do Platform Engineers Make More Than DevOps Engineers? – The Platform Engineering Show EP2

Hey everyone, welcome to the Platform Engineering Show. com. org.

So we got all the platform engineerings here for you. What's up Luca? How are you?

I'm good man. How are you doing? I'm good.

Good. I see you're still in Morocco enjoying that Mediterranean lifestyle. Good for you, man.

Yes, yes. Um, goal is, goal is to show up at the Christmas dinner tant, you know, and make everyone else challenge. All right.

That's why. Well, you should be. You should.

Well, I would tell you, you could come here and get tanned, but our weather has been so miserable. I forgot what the sun looks like. We've just really in Florida, rain and cloud.

Yeah. It's been very rainy, very cloudy. It's supposed to go down into the fifties this weekend, which is pretty cold for here.

Yeah. People are freaking out, busting out their coats. They're like, oh, it's nuts.

I don't have the, oh my God, it's so cold. They're running to the stores, stocking up on water. It's crazy.

Um, anyway, man. Welcome. This is episode two of the Platform Engineering Show.

If you, if you miss the first one, it's available. It's available on Textron TV or YouTube or, uh, any of your favorite platform platforms of podcast platforms. They got platform on the brain.

But you, any of your favorite podcast platforms like, uh, apple Podcast, Spotify, et cetera, um, in today's episode, Luca, what are we discussing? So we're talking about the salary gap between platform engineers and devs engineers, um, where mm-hmm. You know, how real that is, where that might come from, um, and what that might mean, um, for, for where we're going as a space.

Absolutely. So I, I, I told you when we were talking off camera, I have some interesting views here. Yeah.

Um, I'm not surprised that platform engineers are making more money than DevOps engineers. You know, when you saw, I first saw this happened already once, right? Yeah.

Well, but here's the deal. com in 2014, there was a huge fight in the community. Like people like Patrick DUIs and John Willis, and, you know, some of the early, uh, Adam Clay Schafer, some of the early people in DevOps who said, there is no such thing as a DevOps engineer.

That's a fallacy. But in spite of that, the, the, the markets kind of decided there was such a thing as a DevOps engineer, right? And, and, and it's funny, Luca, when I first started a DevOps engine, to be a DevOps engineer, you had to know Chef Puppet or Ansible, right?

Maybe a little J and maybe a little Jenkins. That's what a DevOps engineer. That's that was it.

And, and so did that define a DevOps engineer or did that define what DevOps teams do? No, but yet, right. It became one of the most popular jobs out there.

And where, where were most people coming from? Um, into the DevOps engineers rings OP for like ops, you know, ops Just ops people. Just the ops people, right?

Just rebranding to DevOps. Yeah. They, you know, back then, and the DevOps was a different world back then.

Back then the devs used to say, you know, why I don't like DevOps too much ops, it's too OP centric. And you talk to the ops people and they'd say, you know why I don't like DevOps too. Dev centric too.

Dev centric. Too much Dev. And, and so sometimes that's the, the test of a good compromise when each side thinks the other side got a better deal.

It's complaining. Yeah. Uhhuh.

Um, but I, you know, and I, I'll be honest, I went to both sides of this argument, and I came to the conclusion that no, there is no such thing as a DevOps engineer. That's a unicorn, a mythical creature. Mm.

That really, there are DevOps teams that are cross-functional, right? That have security engineers and testing engineers and developers and you know, SREs and, and all of that stuff. Um, so I, I think the jigs up, I I think the market has come to the realization that what exactly is a DevOps engineer?

Why should we pay them now? Mm-hmm. I know a lot about DevOps engineers.

I don't know a lot about platform engineers though, so tell me why they're real and why you think that's got legs. Yeah, I mean, you know, we spoke about in the first episode last week, right? About this, the, the difference between platform engineers, devs, engineers, this like product mindset.

Um, and, and, you know, our platform engineering evolved from DevOps, right? Um, and I think that's really the, the, the, the key lens here, um, uh, to look at this as well, right? Because the way I think about is this, what we're discussing is platform engineering is like this, you know, industrialization, right?

Of how you, you know, basically build and deliver software. Um, and, and this like DevOps approach works in smaller, uh, teams in smaller settings, simpler, uh, tool chains, but it doesn't scale really well to like large enterprise, lots of people. Um, and so once you get to that scale, then that's the, that's the key thing, right?

It's really about recognizing, well, we do need separations of concerns. Like that's a good thing. Um, you know, we had Kelsey Hightower at Pop Con 24 this year, um, and he did this Sari side chat with us, um, and he was saying, you know, if you tell people silos are good, it's a really quick way to get a lot of people in our industry really mad, right?

Um, and, and it, and it shouldn't, and it shouldn't be, right? They shouldn't be the case because silos are good. Um, you know, as long as you have the right, um, you know, the right ways of communicating between things, right?

Um, and, and, and I think that was a very interesting insight for me last week from the conversation, right? Of, of, of, you know, how you framed it, um, from like this historical perspective, deves was kind of like this, like revolutionary swing, um, towards like, Hey, everybody needs to do everything and so on. And I think that's really like the frame, the frame of this conversation for me is like, platform engineering is kinda like bringing back a little bit of, you know, silos.

Not to the extent where like, Hey, we just throw over the fence the code, and like, we don't care about it. Um, but you need some level of separation of concern to be a productive engineer organization at a certain scale, right? If you're 10 people, great, everybody knows everything you can do.

DevOps, fantastic. If you are, you know, 2000 people, you just can't take the same approach, right? Yeah.

10,000 and so, and so that's really the, the, the, the thing. And then I think, you know, to your point, what we're seeing is, um, and, and so I do think that the platform engineer role is more legitimate, if you will. Um, and I hope people are not gonna clip this, uh, than deves than the deves engineer role, right?

Because, because ultimately, um, to your point, like DevOps is, is a, is a methodology, is a practice, is something that we do as a team, is not, it shouldn't have been a role, right? That that's just because the market evolved that way. Whereas platform engineer is a very specific role.

And I think it's actually very important to, um, define it precisely because, um, one risk is that the same, like a very similar thing happens again, which is like, okay, now the doubts engineers rebrand to platform engineers and they don't change anything, right? And they approach building a platform the same way they're used to, you know, uh, uh, building and managing infrastructure, which is a one and done six months infrastructure project. That's not how you are supposed to build a platform.

The platform is a, um, you know, something that is a product. It's, it has a life cycle of five plus years in, in most enterprises. And so that's really how you should approach it as, as a product.

Um, and, and so that's one of the, the key differences between DevOps and platform engineers is this like product approach, product mindset. And, and so that means that you have a very differentiated role from, for example, example INO teams, right? Like infrastructure and operations teams.

Like they're, you still need them, right? You, you need both. And then of course, you know, in some companies, platform engineering becomes this, like I was just talking to like a large financial institution half an hour ago, you know, where like platform engineering is like this huge umbrella term that has INO teams, that has like cloud ops that has SE that has everything underneath it.

But whether, you know, regardless of what your end, the, the end sort of like org structure looks like on your, on, on your end, it's important that that platform that the platform team has its own sort of like mission and role, which is building a product, is not maintaining the infrastructure that that product runs on, right? And so that's where, you know, INO teams are still necessary. That's where SREs are still necessary, right?

It's not that like platform engineers, uh, replace any of these. It's more augment them, um, and really bring that, uh, product perspective into the, into the equation. Yep.

Few thoughts on that. So first of all, I don't know if you're familiar, there's a show on Apple tv. It's in its second season now, it's called Silo.

Did you ever see this show or hear of it? No, I haven't. No.

You should check it out. It's called Silo. So it's a sci-fi series, right?

Uhhuh. And the idea is something happened on Earth, the earth is poisoned. You know, typical sci-fi stuff, the earth is yeah.

Poison, toxic. And people live in a silo. Like there's a silo that goes way underground.

And this like whole society lives within this silo, and the silo somehow filters the air and it doesn't, and it's a hundred years or hundreds of years already, and people are just living in this silo, right? And then some woman did something wrong and they exile her outta the silo to the wastelands. And she goes out there, you know what?

She finds other silos. And so it turns out that there's all of these silos out there where humanity has survived, but they don't communicate other, and they're not aware of each other, other that is funny. Right?

Okay. And so they don't, and they don't, you know, one silo is all dead 'cause the catastrophe happened or something, you know, a virus outbreak, another silo is doing really well. Another silo, not people are starving.

Where Right. Had they had communication, you have all the different branches, right, basically. Right?

Yeah. They're all like little Petri dishes. But had they had communication, the hole would've been better, right?

Maybe they could have reclaimed the earth or something by then. It's the same thing here, right? When you have silos, it's okay if, if you're a platform engineer and you're doing your job, you're not a developer, you're a platform engineer, and a developer is a developer, it's the communication that's the key.

And that, that was really the part about dev. Like if you speak to Patrick Dubois and, and some of those folks mm-hmm. It was about the communication.

Mm. It wasn't about the title, it wasn't about being a DevOps engineer. It wasn't about knowing everything.

It was about the communication working together, right? In, in sort of harmony, if you will, to accomplish the common goal. You said something last week too that I thought was, was really dead on, which was, we can't expect developers to be responsible for building their own platforms, right?

Think about that's like saying, Hey, you wanna live in this house, go build the house. Then you could live in the house that might have worked like, you know, in, in the, in the American west in the 18 hundreds or something where you, it's a very simple house. Yeah.

Like then Yeah. Right? And if it's a locked cabin, yeah.

But that's not the way Martin software works, right? You can't tell someone go build their own house and then you can live in the house. Yeah, exactly.

People wanna buy houses. And this communication and this communication thing, I think is super interesting, right? Because I, you know, we, we spoke about this like product mindset as kind of like one of the key sort of differences between the, you know, this like ops approach and like the from approach.

But, and, and one thing that also always comes up is this also like communication thing, right? Um, and I think it's very interesting, and I think it speaks to the fact that like, despite the original, uh, intentions, this, this communication focus was really lost in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the DevOps world, right? Because, you know, now people are looking at platform engineering.

And when I, every time I say, yeah, like, you know, one of the key skill sets of a platform engineer is, is communication, right? Why? Because you need to mediate between all the different, you know, vested interests, basically all, all the ifferent stakeholder groups.

Like you need to make the developers happy. You need to do, you need to make executives happy, you need to make, uh, the INO teams, the security, the architects, everyone happy. You need to get everybody on board.

And you need to be a really strong communicator to do that, because the way you speak to the value of the platform, uh, you know, to developers is completely different than when you do it to, um, you know, executives. Like, you know, developers are gonna be about waiting times and security teams are, is gonna be like enforcing compliance. Automatically.

Executives gonna be about time to market. If you talk to developers of downtown to market, they're not gonna care, right? So, um, and, and so that, and so that's why you need to be a really strong communicator.

But I think what's very interesting, you know, on, based on what you just said is, is this right? That, that, like, people are very, like, every time I say this, people are like, yes. You know, everybody just like nods and is like, wow.

Yeah. Like, you know, as if it's like a revolutionary concept, right? Like, except like it was the same thing in doubts to your point.

It's just that it got lost. Yeah. It, it, it got pushed to the side, you know, with this whole, with people wanting, you know, hire DevOps engineers, frankly, right?

Where the real DevOps people knew that a DevOps engineer was kind of a squishy thing at best. Um, but let, let's talk about platform engineers Europe versus North America for a second, right? Yeah.

I mean, yes. The US or North America, you know, meaning Mexico, Canada as well. Um, I mean, generally it's a bigger market than let's say the EU market.

Um, and I I, but there's usually a little parody I I know in like developers, software developers, yeah. If you get big discrepancies, let's say between Eastern Europe and Western Europe, Northern Europe, southern Europe, we have it in the US too. A platform engineer or a developer in the, in the Bay area in San Francisco makes a lot more than one, you know, in Atlanta, let's say.

Right? Atlanta has relatively lower level, but is there a big discrepancy in salaries, but still between EU and, and North America for that? Yeah.

Yeah. So we, we ran this survey, um, across hundreds of, of, of platform teams, um, and even more individual contributors. 'cause we both asked DevOps and platform engineers, um, you know, how much we make and the numbers are, um, considerably lower.

I wish I could show the slide, maybe like, you know, we can show it later, but, um, yeah, yeah. Or link it somewhere. Yeah.

Well, maybe we could put a link to the, well, what we should do is put a link to the whole report where people can download it. We'll, we'll have that. Yeah.

org. But the, um, you know, what we've seen is, um, there is a, a probably like a 30 40% gap between, uh, sort of like North American and Europe, both in platform engineer and DevOps. Yeah.

And then for example, so consistent. Yeah, consistent. So for example, the baseline for, uh, Europe on platform engineer is 120 grand.

Um, and, and it's about like a hundred for DevOps. Um, on platform engineer is almost 200 grand on, uh, platform engineers, uh, for, for, for North America and for DevOps is 150, um, for, uh, in Europe, right? So, um, platform engineers is higher on both.

So about like 20, 30% higher than DevOps engineers. And then North America is higher on both of those, um, on both of those numbers. Um, and, and, and this is, by the way, I don't know if you've seen, like lately there's a lot of, um, like on x there's a lot of people like posting this, um, this delta that developed between like Europe and the United States, because to your point, well actually Europe is technically a bigger internal marketing internal market, right?

Because they have Right. Like, it's like 500 million consumers instead of like 300 some, uh, but the three 30. Yep.

Yeah. But, but the, but if you look at like post, um, uh, GFC, right? The great financial crisis to in, in oa, like, it just, they complete diverged like up until there, you know, in the nineties and so on, we're kind of like Europe and, and US were like growing at a similar pace.

US was always a little bit higher, but not that much since then, basically Europe flatlined and then, you know, US has gone vertical in the last 10 to 15 years. Um, so it's super interesting to see, um, and, and that, and so, and, and then people kind of like always, you know, just thread, like break it down in terms of like, even if you look at like, really, like, I think it workers, software engineers, it's so much, it, like they're, they're the, the, the delta is huge, right? Like we're talking, you know, I was just talking to like a, a really good product team actually in the platform engineering space in, in Portugal.

Um, they are pre-seed, probably like few million something that they raised. Um, and they have like 15 engineers since like a year, right? Like, this would be impossible to do in like New York, or you couldn't do it.

Yeah. No way. Yeah, no way.

And so, and, and so I think like, and so in some sense it's, it's not a bad thing, right? Because from a startup cost perspective, it's, it's, uh, it's easier. But, you know, broadly de definitely you can see there's like a big gap.

And, and I mean, Europe is, is being smoked right now. We're really just being left behind. Well, you know, so I I, I read this whole series of books by a guy named Thomas Friedman who writes for the New York Times.

The whole like, I dunno if you ever heard The World Is Flat, is a book he wrote. Mm-hmm. And then he wrote, yeah, it's a flat hot world and it's flat, this and that.

My my thought is, especially when we're talking western Europe, right? It's not the stone age. There, there is technologically advanced, I think, as most of the us and that's why I'd love to see the, the numbers like is it maybe that platform engineering is a relatively new discipline.

And so most of the platform engineers are based like in the Bay Area or New York and Boston, where yeah, you gotta make 200 K just to live. Mm. Right?

200 K is not living high on the high in New York. The geo bias, right? The geo distribution bias, right?

Yeah. That's interesting, right? Mm-hmm.

But what's a, what's a platform engineer in Dallas making, or Atlanta or Charlotte or Miami, or you know, where mm-hmm. Cost of living is a little less than New York or Boston or San Francisco. And, and maybe there's just more platform engineers concentrated there because they're more, um, tech savvy.

They're more advanced technologically. You don't have, I mean, heck, I'm trying to get a social media person down here in South Florida who has B2B and tech industry experience, and I can't find one. I can't find one because they're not, well, I can find industry there.

Plenty of social media people. There's no tech. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. I've got plenty of social media people applying who have done makeup companies, real estate companies, financial advisors, um, you know, all kinds of crazy stuff like this. But not, not in the tech space.

'cause they're not here. Yeah. Right.

And, and supposedly Florida's getting very tech like Miami, they want to do Silicon Beach and they're doing all these things. Mm-hmm. But we don't have that community that you have in New York or Boston or San Francisco or Austin.

Right. Uh, and I wonder if that's not part of it. But the other thing from the flat earth stuff is look, if it's that much cheaper to go to Portugal and get a platform engineering team team, and I'm a startup guy, and I say, okay, I need a platform engineering team.

I could do it in Portugal for half the price. Yeah. I'm gonna do it in Portugal for half the price.

I gotta be stupid not to. Right? Yeah.

It's the whole reason why India has an IT industry. 'cause it was half the price or less Yeah, right. To get engineers and, and that's happening, right?

Like if you look at like Eastern Europe, like there's a huge, and there's a, and it's interesting because while, to your point earlier, it was, I think it was mostly just like, okay, you know, western Europe more expensive, which is higher in Eastern Europe. I see now a lot of actually US based companies just hiring in Europe and Eastern Europe because, you know, it, it become like, as everybody becomes, you know, more used to the whole remote thing, um, it's, it's like, of course, like why wouldn't I do that? Or, or even Canada, I mean even Canada, you know, you're like, up in Canada from like the west coast is already a lot, a lot cheaper than, than for if you're in sf, right?

Um, so for sure. Um, but, but I think like on the, on the Europe side of things, what's, you know, the problem is, is, is, is is also just like, you know, you know, we, we said like, okay, well this is this this large internal market, but actually it's, it's not true because you need to like re re localize every time your product, your services, whatever you do. Not just from a language perspective, but from a regulation perspective.

And it's really like regulation that's killing it. Right? Um, so, so that's a whole nother episode we should do, which is, especially with the new administration coming in here in the US and, you know, the, the, the, the government of Germany just had a no confidence vote and got right wingers in Italy and, you know, is the world entering, you know, I grew up in the, we should have no trade barriers.

It's a small world after all. Mm-hmm. And, you know, and we should, and then that, that's the best thing for everyone, right?

Bring, bring American style, luxury American lifestyle to the whole world. Let everyone be consumers. And that would be good for everyone.

I don't know if it turned out to be so good for everyone, but, but the bottom line is like free trade, right? Let the best country win. Let the best engineers win.

If it's cheaper in Portugal, do it in Portugal. But now we're entering I think another era where people are putting up tariffs and barriers and it has to be made here and supplied, you know, it's under change security. We're gonna make sure we have the ability to make our own chips here and make our own silicon here and make our own.

I don't know. And it's not the us especially with this new administration, you're gonna see a lot of that. I, but I think you're also gonna start seeing it in Europe too, right?

Yeah. Walls probably more mores probably. We, we tend to follow, right?

So it's interesting. Yeah. Going back to the silos.

Yeah, no, I, I, you know what I, I think it's actually been in the year in this move to the right has been in Europe. I think US is a little later to it, right? If you look, I mean, well, UK went the other way.

UK has a labor government now. But I mean, you go to Greece, you go to Italy, you look at what's going on in Germany now, even in Israel, which you know, is kind of EMEA and I mean, these are right wing governments that yeah, we trade isn't isn't their calling card, it's protect our industry a hundred percent. Yeah.

And so I, I think the whole world's doing that. The whole world's going this way. And, and what does that mean for us?

I, you know, like I said, that's a whole nother episode. We can talk about its about's a topic about, but it's very interesting, you know, a game theory perspective as well, like when there, because Yeah, yeah. Like if one starts, then the other one goes like, it's, it's interesting thing.

Um, ed for tat Yeah, exactly. Ed for tat you know, I just, what did I see China just launched this week? The, the first, so basically, you know, Elon Musk satellite, the internet, right?

The, I forget the name of it now, his internet, I have one starlink China. So China is launching their own starlink. They wanna put 14,000.

Oh, I didn't know. Yeah. They just sent the first batch up this week.

Now they didn't do a lot of publicity around it, probably because they copied some copyrighted stuff or whatever. Who knows with them. But, you know, but they're, they're, you know, so now you're gonna have competing satellites and they, it's gonna be interesting times over the next 10, 20 years I think is kind of the world kinda readjust.

Readjust. Oh yeah. Um, so platform engineering salary.

What about compared to developers? Yeah, we got, we, we we got astray a little bit. Um, so, you know, like in general, um, I think, uh, I have an interesting data point here.

Um, 'cause we asked people also just like how senior they are, uh, in this survey, uh, which I think was very interesting. Um, and, and this will kind of explain, right? Like the, the, the gap between the, you know, between platform engineers and developers is pretty high.

Um, and the reason is that, you know, platform engineering ultimately is not an entry job. Right. Whereas developers, it could, you know, normally it is, right?

It's just where you start and then you're a junior developer and then you go up. Yeah. Um, and you know, so we, we were breaking it down.

Uh, so out of the hundreds of people that we asked, only like less than 5% has less than two years experience. 15% has three to five years experience. 34% has six to 10 years experience.

18% has 11 to 15, and 28% has over 16 years experience. Right? So like, you know, if you look at this, basically something like 80% is at least about six, six years or six or more years.

Yeah. Yeah. And then basically half of them is more than 10 years.

Right? So, so that tells you, so, so how do you grow new platform? So this raises an interesting question.

There's a gap there. Yeah. Right?

There's a how do you, how do you, how do you grow new platform engineers, right? Because the, getting them to that six year mark is, is hard, right? This is the old, you know, I want to get my first job.

Well, you gotta have experience before we could give your first job. Yeah, yeah. It's a catch 22.

You know, how do you, how do you overcome that? Or is is that like a cliff we gotta worry about? No, I think that's a great, this is super interesting, right?

Because also, and the other, the, the point that's in the report is like right after that is, is then you look at the, the average age of the teams, and obviously it's way younger, right? So, you know, it's like, it's like, uh, 10% is zero to six months. You know, over, over half is like under three years, right?

Um, and only like 10% is over five years. So what that tells you is like these people of course are, um, you know, they have a lot of experience. They don't necessarily have a lot of experience.

They're as, as engineers. Yeah. They're recycled, right?

Right. So from DevOps, from other CloudOps accessory, other things. And so, um, and so I think to your point, to your question, right?

Like how, like there's definitely a shortage right now, I think in the market. I wouldn't say the shortage is, is necessarily in, um, people that are able technically to build a platform. I think the shortage is in this, in people that think with this product mindset, right?

Um, and an actual like, you know, product managers for platforms is a huge shortage. Like I see it, whether it's on our products pipelines, whether it's on, um, you know, general companies that I consult with. Um, you know, even the very large, you know, people that I partner with like ThoughtWorks and like, you know, very large providers, they even have a shortage internally, right?

So they have like all this like pipeline. Um, there's a lot of demand in general, I think in the, in the, in the market for platform engineering. There's just not enough and there's enough technical people that can build a platform.

There's not enough product people that can actually drive the, like, you know, good platforms basically, and not platforms that Right. Nobody adopts or that they're actually missing the point, right? Um, and, and so, and so I think the solution there is twofold.

One is just more education for everybody, right? This is where, where we rolled out the courses and the trainings, and it's really about like raising all boats at the same time. Because, you know, you made a point earlier of this like dos engineers this like, um, you know, unicorn.

Um, I also think this like technical platform product manager is a, is is maybe not a unicorn, but very close, right? Yeah. It's very, very hard to do this, right?

Like, how can you be like technical enough to, you know, spar with, you know, people that have 16 years experience building these things. Um, but at the same time have the soft skills to, you know, communicate with like very, um, you know, high level with, you know, very senior executives because these are very large companies, but also like low level developers and figure out what they want. Like I, this is just like, and then that's a very unique skillset.

Yeah. And you have very few of these people. And then what you see is, uh, enterprises, when they recognize this stallion, they're like, no, no, no, no, you're not gonna work on an internal facing product.

You're gonna work on a external facing product. So I'm not gonna put you on the internal developer platform team, right? Um, and so, and so that's where the shortage comes from.

And I think it, and so I think for me is yes, we need to train more of these people and build them up, but I think it's the, the short term solution, short to midterm solution, um, is actually take you, you know, all this like existing people that have a lot of experience and make sure that they adopt some basic understanding of this, of this with this product mindset, right? Um, you don't need to become like a super proficient, you know, technical product manager. You just need to, you know, understand, Hey, what is platform engineering?

Why are we doing this? You know? Uh, and, and, and like, who are our customers?

Our customers are developers, right? You just need to have a bit more, you know, switch a little bit that, that's really customer centric focus and product centric focus when you, when you build your platform. And I think that's gonna get us 80% of the, of the way there.

Agreed. Hey, as long as we're getting stuff off our chest, I got another type of engineer. I wanna ask your opinion on uhhuh.

And that is the, the so-called full stack engineer. So is there really such a thing as a full stack engineer, have full stack engineers become platform engineers? Or is there ever such thing as a full stack engineer?

God knows they were hiring enough of 'em, right? And they were paying them good money, but what, what's your view on full stack engineers? Well, I think it's, I think it's, from my perspective, it's just interesting, um, to see this industry, um, just how, or how much, you know, developers say they hate marketing, how quickly they fall into marketing things, you know?

Um, and I think like full stack is just like another example of this, right? It's like, you know, the same thing of like, people that created now said, Hey, this shouldn't be a devs engineer, and then everybody falls into the south engineer thing, right? And it's just like, um, I think it's, um, you know, all these titles, you know, I was, I was listening to this podcast like a few months ago where this guy was basically running growth at Facebook back in the days, and he was saying, you know, we needed, um, data scientists except 'cause we had a lot of data to analyze all this thing except the like, data scientist wasn't a thing.

They created it right before it was called some sort of business analyst. Like, something that, that sound boring basically, right? And they're like, no, I need this PhDs, right?

That, you know, and I'm gonna pay them a lot of money. But the problem is, if you package this as like, you know, a like a business analyst, nobody's gonna come, right? And so they were like, oh, you know, they all come from like physics and thing, like, they like the science thing.

So like, just call it data science. They literally, that's why. And you know, and now you have like, you know, all this curriculum in, in curricula in, in, in, in, in universities of like data science.

But like the, the actual data science thing was invented by Facebook as a way, as a hiring tactic basically. Um, to make it sound sexy. It's marketing to make it sound sexy.

And so, like, you know, if physics PhD would go and like, do become a data scientist because it's cool, um, and they paid you a lot of money. Mm-hmm. Um, and, and so I think it's like, this is a bit of the same thing, right?

Where like somebody just figured out, you know, I, I mean I had the same thing at some point I had to hire, um, somebody for growth as well, and I was, I had this like, demand generation lead and I was getting really bad applications. And then at some point I just put like out of growth and then like all of a sudden, you know, it's like all this like small tweaks that you make, um, um, um, you know, so maybe there's one for your, uh, for your, uh, for your social media badge full stack. Um, yeah, well stock for my, so I'm think I've thought about how do I make that social media thing sex?

That's a whole nother story. Yeah. Anyway, look, I think it's, it's just about we're way over time people making it sexy too.

Hmm. Yeah. It's, it's marketing my friend.

It is marketing. We're outta time. Hey, we, we will be, we'll be, this is our last show for 2024.

Our next one will be 2025. Um, we also have some webinars or round tables around the platform engineering show coming up in January. We will be publishing all of that, I guess, in our social, if I could get a social media person publishing all that in our social media, uh, stuff.

But this has been a great conversation, man. Enjoy Morocco. Have a, a happy merry Christmas Luca and a happy new Year.

And to everyone watching or listening to this Merry Christmas, happy new Year to you as well. And we'll be back in 2025. We're just getting started with the platform engineering show.

Yes. Thank you. Happy holidays.

Merry Christmas everybody. Thank you, Alan. Bye-bye.

Alrighty. Bye-bye.